Lyons: Federal agents' raid wasn't first blunder that day

Team looking for suspect went after wrong people twice within a few hours.

Tom Lyons

Cookie decorator Elliott Stiner left his job at Westfield Sarasota Square mall on Wednesday afternoon last week and walked to the bus stop.

The 22-year-old sat on the curb and started reading a book.

He didn't notice then, but Stiner thinks he was followed out by several men. He had no clue they were there until a man spoke behind him.

“Hey, buddy!” the voice said.

As Stiner turned, the men were on top of him and tackled him, pressing his forehead into the pavement.

Next thing he knew he was in handcuffs.

By then he had realized they must be plainclothes cops, about six of them. They were looking at his face and holding a cellphone next to it to compare him to a picture, and were checking his ID.

Oops. Wrong guy.

They then insisted to Stiner that, from a little distance, he had looked just like the man they were seeking.

“They were just extremely apologetic,” Stiner said, “They made a lot of excuses once they realized I was the wrong person.”

Stiner thinks he looks about as much like the man as most 20-something white guys of similar build would.

The men who tackled him didn't ever identify what agency they were from before they left, Stiner says. And he wondered if the man they were looking for was such a violent, dangerous guy that six cops had to tackle him first and ask his name afterward.

Why, he asked me, was there no “Freeze, put your hands up"?

Turns out one Sarasota deputy was there but the takedown was done by a team led by federal marshals. And when they left the mall without making an arrest, the team was soon on its way to an even bigger blunder.

You may have read about that one, in a previous column. Led by U.S. Marshal Matt Wiggins, the team was looking for Kyle Riley, wanted because a teenaged relative accused him of a series of sexual assaults starting when she was 8 years old.

Wiggins decided their wanted man was across town in a Sarasota apartment complex.

By about 8 p.m., he had a clueless and terrified Doctors Hospital operating room nurse, Louise Goldsberry, pinned down in a gun-to-gun standoff at her Hidden Lake Village apartment.

Wiggins had opened her front door and aimed his gun inside at the woman and her boyfriend who — not believing the demanding, cursing armed men outside were really cops — had refused to open the door. Afterward, Wiggins blamed Goldsberry for the mix-up. She should have known they were cops and just come out, he said.

Wiggins told me his team came to the apartment on a tip that put the wanted man somewhere in the complex.

But I'm now sure there was no tip.

Wiggins jumped to his bad conclusions both times after using cellphone tracking information. Somehow — Wrong number? Imprecise triangulation? Shoddy map reading? — it had led him astray. Or maybe the wanted man was close by, but got away as the agents focused on the wrong people.

Riley was arrested several hours later, elsewhere in town.

The actions against Goldsberry and Stiner seem over the top and involve jumping to conclusions and rash actions.

Stiner's father said those cops need to be set straight about their responsibilities.

“They didn't care who they ran over to get who they wanted,” Fred Stiner said.

Andrea Mogensen, a Sarasota attorney known for taking on local civil rights cases, says Goldsberry is now her client.

Maybe some at the U.S. Marshals Service see a problem, too. Both incidents are under investigation by the Marshals Service Office of Inspections, said Pete Cajigal, assistant chief of the U.S. Marshals Service's Tampa-based middle district of Florida.

“We take this extremely seriously, what has occurred and what is alleged,” Cajigal told me.

He seemed to mean it, and he took notes as I gave him a third case to check out.

I had just talked to another Sarasota woman who said she and her boyfriend were manhandled and insulted and held in their front yard after they awoke to marshals breaking down their door on a Friday morning a few weeks ago.

She said they were startled and confused but opened the door before it was knocked down, yet were grabbed, yanked outside, handcuffed and put on the ground at gunpoint. The woman said they were called liars, and more, during a long session in front of neighbors.

She said they had no idea who the man was that marshals said they were looking for, apparently on a firearms charge.

The woman said her arm was in a sling for two weeks after the incident.

Cajigal said he would look into that incident, too.

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